Giants of the Jungle

By

Tunku
Varadarajann

Updated March 4, 2002 12:01 a.m. ET

The fact that should astonish most of us about "Gorillas," a two-hour-long documentary to be aired next Sunday on the A&E network, is not that the apes in question are such nice, gentle creatures, but that the people who study and protect them today are so nice and gentle too.

Like most laymen, my understanding of the gorilla world has depended mainly on the image of Dian Fossey, a complex and, it turned out, rather ghastly woman who founded a gorilla reserve in the highlands of Rwanda and did more to bring those animals into the mainstream of public imagination than any person before her.

Fossey, who was hacked to death with a machete in her bed 16 years ago -- by whom, we still do not know, though it could have been poachers, a disgruntled Rwandan servant, or even an American colleague -- saw herself as a benign earth-mother to the highland gorillas she helped protect. There can be no denying her path-breaking achievements, and had it not been for her, and for the attention she attracted to the cause of the mountain gorillas, it is possible that we might, today, have been talking of those animals in the past tense.

But Fossey was also a racist alcoholic who regarded "her" gorillas as better than the African people who lived around them. Her anthropomorphization of the apes was matched by her unceasing belittlement of the area's natives. Arguably the world's first eco-colonialist, she habitually referred to Rwandans as "wogs," never in all her time recruited a single black African as a researcher and even burned the crops of neighboring peasants whom she suspected let their cattle graze in the reserve.

"Gorillas," the documentary -- like "Gorillas in the Mist," the 1988 film based on Fossey's life, starring Sigourney Weaver -- chooses not to delve into the darker recesses of Fossey's story. In fact, Fossey's presence in the documentary is pretty minimal, with the narrator, Martin Sheen, glossing over her perversities in describing her merely as a "colorful and controversial woman." (One wishes, and here I digress, that Mr. Sheen had remained in the West Wing, for his delivery is pure, and unnecessary, Hollywood. He has too much hushed breathlessness for my taste, and it is all very distracting. Why the producers felt the need to add him to the cast is a question beyond me. Weren't the gorillas good enough?)

One wishes, also, that the film's focus had been less kid-gloved about Fossey. How can one make a lengthy documentary on gorillas and not devote a serious chunk of attention to her? Naturally, I can see the need to move beyond her, and to bring to attention the new generation of primatologists who work with gorillas, but without adequate treatment of Fossey, and her black spots, there is a gap in the heart of the film.

That is not to say that there is little of value here. Far from it. There is beguiling footage of the apes, taken in both Rwanda and the Congo, and one is introduced to numerous excellent scientists who have worked devotedly in the background, in Fossey's giant shadow. And they are all so generous and humane, such antitheses of Fossey!

Bill Weber and Amy Vedder -- a husband and wife team -- are two of them. They worked with Fossey at various times in their careers and are remarkably restrained on camera in their account of their time with her. (By contrast, they discuss Fossey with great frankness and detail in their book, "In the Kingdom of Gorillas," in which there is a gruesome description of an occasion when she pistol-whipped a man suspected of poaching on her reserve, and then supervised his prolonged torture at her camp, including the rubbing of stinging nettles on his penis and testicles. Drs. Weber and Vedder write: "He was then given enough Valium to send him into a state of extreme disorientation. When he came to, Dian told him that she had taken his mind away, then given it back. Next time she would keep it.")

This monster is the woman so sainted as the savior of gorillas, and it is refreshing, now, to learn of the works of such civilized counter-spirits as Drs. Weber and Vedder. They were at the forefront of initiatives to conserve gorillas, not by attempting to cut the beasts off from the world around them (and vice-versa, as Fossey had done), but by encouraging the Rwandan people and government to think of gorillas as an economic resource that could enrich them through eco-tourism -- i.e. lucrative gawking at gorillas by Westerners. The film didn't go into much detail here, but we are informed, also, that during the genocidal civil war in Rwanda in 1990, the gorillas were left largely unharmed. The Hutu militias, it seemed, were too busy killing their Tutsi foes to care about primates.

Another particularly impressive primatologist is Magdalena Bermejo, a Spaniard, who works out of a research station in Lossi, in Congo-Brazzaville. Her project is to "habituate" the local lowland gorillas to a human presence, a sine qua non if eco-tourism is to be successful. It takes seven years to habituate a group, work that can be undone overnight if a group has a nasty encounter with a poacher. How carefully Dr. Bermejo goes about her business can be gauged from a sequence in which one sees her snipping her way through dense jungle with a pair of garden shears. Chopping a path with a machete would be immeasurably easier, but the noise might disturb the gorillas, who, in spite of their size and aspect, are fragile creatures, easily disconcerted.

Poachers, however, prefer a combination of machete and gun, and of these hunters of the gorilla there appears, alas, to be no shortage. The most sobering parts of the documentary are those toward the end, when we spend time in the company of Karl Ammann, a conservationist photographer who specializes in taking pictures of "bush meat." We see gorilla heads in markets, dismembered apes arranged for sale at butchers' stalls and gorilla hands roasting on coals.

None of this is pretty, and one wonders how long it will be before the urgency of local appetites will brush aside the disposition toward conservation, not to mention the painstaking labors of such outsiders as Dr. Bermejo. There is a logic to the elimination of animals in poor, overcrowded countries that is often relentless, and invariably ugly. Dian Fossey, for one, recognized that. Her strength, and her downfall, was that she had no illusions. In spite of the heartening message of this documentary -- that there is hope for these animals -- we must, in the end, fear for them.

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